


The Greatest Thing You'll Ever Learn

by flawedamythyst



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Asexuality, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-12
Updated: 2010-12-12
Packaged: 2017-10-15 11:00:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/160168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flawedamythyst/pseuds/flawedamythyst
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock and John watch Moulin Rouge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Greatest Thing You'll Ever Learn

They had a policy. Or rather, John had a policy, and Sherlock sulkily submitted to it. Every time someone made a reference to a film that everyone knew but that Sherlock didn't get, John forced him to sit down and watch the film as soon as he could get him to stay put on the sofa for long enough.

He quite liked the evenings that followed, even if Sherlock very rarely liked the films and usually ended up going into a rant about them, pinpointing every plot hole and technical inaccuracy as well as deriding the general populace for having made them popular. It was, at least, a chance to sit down and do something that was technically normal, even if Sherlock still managed to put his own spin on it.

One such evening occurred after a case that featured murdered prostitutes. Anderson wondered aloud why real prostitutes never looked like Nicole Kidman, to which Donovan pointed out that it wouldn't matter if they did, because he looked nothing like Ewan McGregor. Apparently they were still on the 'off' part of their off-and-on affair. Sherlock had stared blankly at them both until they'd rolled their eyes and wandered off, so after the case was all wrapped up, John went to Blockbuster and rented Moulin Rouge.

He informed Sherlock that they were spending that evening watching it, expecting the usual half hour wrangle, but Sherlock seemed unusually agreeable to the plan. John wondered with a vague sense of dread what that could possibly mean, but pushed it to one side in the interest of not becoming completely paranoid, which was a constant risk while living with Sherlock. The constant surprises, mostly unpleasant, did tend to leave him metaphorically checking over his shoulder for the next biological hazard.

Still, Sherlock managed to restrain himself from anything too insane that evening, settling on the sofa without comment when John put the DVD on. They settled down, Sherlock pushing his ice-cold feet under John's thigh in order to warm them before the opening song was even over, and John had to forcibly remind himself that the physical proximity didn't mean anything. Sherlock, hopefully, had no idea what reaction was caused every time he touched John in a casual, absent-minded fashion like that.

“If you wore socks, or even those slippers that Mrs. Hudson bought you for Christmas, your feet wouldn't be nearly so cold,” John told him, shifting obligingly so that Sherlock's feet could nestle all the way under. It wasn't taking advantage if Sherlock had initiated it, after all.

“John,” said Sherlock in the same tone of voice as he usually said 'idiot', “those slippers were _orange_.”

He had a point so John let it go, content to just watch the film. He wasn't a huge fan of romance films and he'd usually consider Moulin Rouge the kind of film that you watched with a woman you were trying to get into bed, but he hadn't seen it since before he'd gone to Afghanistan and at least the songs were catchy.

Sherlock watched with a curious level of concentration and in dead silence for the first quarter of an hour. Usually he barely allowed the first line of dialogue to be spoken before he started in on how terrible the whole thing was, then retrieved his laptop in order to keep himself entertained during the rest of it. John's faint sense of creeping dread grew stronger and he resolutely pushed it aside. The case had been a long one and Sherlock hadn't got much rest during it – maybe he was just tired.

The silence wasn't broken until Ewan McGregor had been singing Your Song for a while. Sherlock made a disgusted noise. “You didn't tell me there was magic in this,” he said.

“There's not,” said John, trying to stave off a repeat of the Harry Potter incident.

“They've just flown out the window. Of course it's magic. I've been to Paris and there's no way they can expect us to believe they went over the rooftops from Montmatre to the Eiffel Tower in just a couple of steps.”

John added _been to Paris_ to his internal file on Sherlock's past, which was still extremely thin, even after over a year of living together. “It's a visual metaphor,” he said.

That earned him a frown and a couple of minutes of blissful silence before the next outburst. “Flying over Paris is a metaphor for being in love?”

“Yes,” said John firmly.

“Wrong,” claimed Sherlock just as firmly.

John rolled his eyes. “Trust me, it is,” he said. “I suppose I can't expect you to understand – you've never been in love.”

“Also wrong,” said Sherlock, and John turned away from Nicole Kidman to stare at him. “And,” continued Sherlock as if he was completely unaware of John's shocked stare, “it wasn't anything like flying. It was horrible.”

John didn't have a response to that. He hadn't ever imagined Sherlock being in love, or even being capable of it. There was silence for several more minutes as the film kept playing and John tried desperately to fit that in with what he knew of Sherlock already. Someone at university, maybe. Someone who, clearly, hadn’t treated Sherlock very well if the vehemence in his voice when he'd said 'horrible' was anything to go by. He tried to picture what sort of person Sherlock might fall in love with. Someone clever, obviously. Probably ridiculously good-looking, almost certainly just as logical and science-obsessed as Sherlock.

All that brought to his mind was an image of a hot version of Spock. It might not have been a man, of course – John just presumed that Sherlock was gay based on his complete disgust for almost all women. He tried putting the attributes he'd come up with on a woman but just came up with Spock as a hot woman. He made a face.

“What?” demanded Sherlock.

“Nothing, sorry,” said John, then decided to be honest in the hopes of coaxing out a few more details. “I'm trying to work out what kind of person you might fall in love with, given your low opinion of anyone who isn't yourself. I just keep picturing Spock.”

Sherlock frowned. “Who?” he asked. John sighed and added Star Trek to the list of films they had to watch. “It shouldn't be that hard to picture. You've looked in a mirror plenty of times, haven't you?”

There was a faint buzzing in John's ears as he worked that out. He stared even harder at Sherlock as the revelation sunk in. “What?” he asked in a faint voice. “It was me?”

Sherlock scowled at him. “Well, of course it was you. Who else is there? You don't have to get excited about it – it was inconvenient and unpleasant, so I stopped it.”

John blinked at him a few times. “You stopped it?” he repeated. It was the least of the questions he wanted to ask right now, but probably the safest.

“Yes,” said Sherlock. “It was easy. You have to be able to control your emotions, you know, or they end up controlling you.”

“Right,” said John faintly, still reeling from the revelation. “Sorry, wait, when was this?”

Sherlock shrugged as if it wasn't important. “Oh, I don't know. Six months ago?”

There had been nothing noticeably different about Sherlock's behaviour six months ago, nothing at all that pointed at him having any form of softer feelings for John. “You didn't say anything,” John said accusingly. He had a sickening feeling in his stomach, the leaden weight of having missed a chance he hadn't even known he had.

“Of course not,” said Sherlock. “What would have been the point? That might have made things awkward – our friendship is worth too much to risk that. Besides, you know I have no interest in sex, and I know you do, so cutting the emotion off before it could cause any problems was much the best thing to do.” He stopped and took a careful breath, the only sign so far that he didn't view this topic as casually as he would a conversation about whose turn it was to do the shopping.

“The point is, it was nothing like flying. This film is stupid. I thought it was going to provide me with further data on all this stuff, but it's essentially useless.” He waved a hand vaguely at the screen on 'all this stuff', but John wasn't sure if he meant love in general, popular romance films or the effects of absinthe on Montmartren residents at the turn of the century.

“No, it's not,” contradicted John, pushing away the temptation to dwell on what Sherlock had said. There'd be plenty of time for that later, when he was on his own and not under the scrutiny of a man who could tell your every thought by the twitch of your eyebrow. Allowing himself to think through the precise reasons that Sherlock had thought a relationship between them wouldn't work, and to refute them all, even if it was only in his head, was just asking for trouble. Much better to concentrate on his criticisms of the film for now.

“It's different when it's just you, and the other person doesn't know. Feels more like...” he hesitated, thinking through exactly how it felt to love someone who you had no hope of ever returning the feeling, “like a sucking black hole in your chest that's threatening to swallow parts of who you are, right?”

Sherlock tipped his head to one side thoughtfully. “Overly romanticised,” he declared, “but accurate enough, I suppose.”

“Right,” said John, then gestured at the screen. “The flying is when the person you love loves you back. The feeling when you first kiss them, and know that there's two of you feeling the same way.”

“Ah,” said Sherlock, still frowning. “I suppose I'll have to take your word for that, then. Still seems ridiculous, though.”

He turned back to the film where Ewan McGregor was seducing a prostitute using love songs. John just kept watching him, his brain still running ridiculously fast in order to try and make sense of this new information. There had to be some way to prove Sherlock wrong on at least some of his assumptions, even if it was too late for John to prove him wrong about the possibilities of a relationship between them working.

On screen, the moon started to sing with joy as the couple kissed and Sherlock made an irritated, grumbling sound in his throat. John sighed.

“I know you don't like sex,” he said. “How do you feel about kissing?”

Sherlock turned to look at him, frowning slightly. “It's fine,” he said slowly.

John nodded to himself. “Right then,” he said, shifting on the sofa to bring himself closer to Sherlock. “Shut your eyes.”

“Why?” asked Sherlock immediately. “John-”

“You wanted to know what it felt like,” said John. “Then you can understand this film properly, and stop moaning about it. Well,” he added more accurately, “stop moaning about that part of it. Shut your eyes.”

Almost miraculously, Sherlock did.

“Right,” said John again, starting to feel a bit nervous. It was possible that this was not his most brilliant plan ever. “I know you said you were over it – over me, but think back to how it used to feel, okay? Try and fill your head with exactly how it was to be in love.”

Sherlock nodded distractedly, his brow furrowing as he complied. John gave himself a second to just look at Sherlock's face, then leant forward and kissed him.

He'd been told often enough by others that he was a rather good kisser, and he put everything he had into it. All the little tricks he knew, all the ways to make someone feel like the centre of the universe and, most of all, everything he felt for Sherlock. Sherlock let out a tiny noise from his throat and opened his mouth, and John took advantage of that, claiming everything he could. If this was going to be the only chance he had, then he was bloody well going to use it.

When he sat back, Sherlock stayed exactly where he was for a moment, then cleared his throat. “I see,” was all he said before sitting back to watch the rest of the film.

John copied his movement but was barely able to even see the screen, let alone concentrate on the characters. His heart was beating like a drum, as if it was trying to break out of his chest, and his lips tingled as if Sherlock's were still pressed against them, like an imprint that John would feel for the rest of his life.

It was another twenty minutes before Sherlock spoke again. “I'm afraid I might have misrepresented myself to you earlier,” he said without looking away from the screen.

“Oh?” asked John, struggling to keep his voice sounding calm and casual.

“Yes, I appear to have been less successful removing that emotion than I had thought,” said Sherlock. “I hope this won't make things awkward, but from our previous conversation it sounded as if you would prefer to know these things.”

He was staring in a fixed manner at the telly, clearly unwilling to turn and see the reaction that John was having to his statement. When John sprang forward and kissed him again, taking hold of his face and turning it just so, so that it was the perfect angle for his mouth, he appeared to be completely taken by surprise.

Sherlock's shock only lasted the briefest of moments before he turned and kissed John back just as fiercely, hands clasping tightly at his shoulders. John smiled to himself, a surge of joy that felt like fireworks running through him.

Sherlock pulled back breathlessly and grinned at him. “We're not flying,” he pointed out smugly. “No magic here.”

John rolled his eyes. “It was a visual metaphor,” he reminded him and kissed him again. Whatever Sherlock might say, it felt like magic to him.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] The Greatest Thing You'll Ever Learn - flawedamythyst](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2393942) by [consulting_smartass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/consulting_smartass/pseuds/consulting_smartass)




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